Warren Murphy: Judgment Day

Chiun followed Remo into the darkened room. Remo looked around and at the far right of the room, he could see a man sitting in a chair.

"Close the door," came Smith's voice. "The light is on the left-hand wall."

Instinctively, from ten years of habit, Remo obeyed. He closed the door first and then turned on the light. Two lamps on the dresser went on, illuminating the room.

Remo turned, looked at Smith and laughed. Smith was sitting in a chair at the far-right corner of the room, next to a radiator. There were handcuffs on his wrists and the cuffs passed under one of the heat riser pipes of the radiator, so that Smith could not move unless his hands were freed. Then Remo noticed something else.

There was a heavy cord in Smith's hands. It looped up to the far wall, where it passed through a screw-eye. The cord moved through a series of screw-eyes along the top of the wall, and then stopped at some kind of device over the door. The device was complicated looking, but it was simple enough for Remo to see that it included two sticks of dynamite.

A damned bomb. Remo turned back to Smith, a complimentary smile on his face.

"Nice going, Smitty," he said. "What makes you think that pile of junk will work?" he asked, nodding over his shoulder toward the bomb over the door.

"Hello, Chiun," Smith said. To Remo, he said, "Explosives were one of my specialties in the war. World War II. It'll work."

"What's the point?" asked Remo. "You know I could shoot you before you pull that string."

"If you carried a gun. But I know a few things about you, Remo. One is that you never carry a weapon."

"I can get you with my hands."

"True," Smith said. "And as I fall, the weight of my body'll set off the bomb."

Remo nodded. "True enough. Stalemate. Now what?"

"I wanted to talk to you with a guarantee that you wouldn't do anything foolish or impulsive."

"Like kill you?"

"Exactly," Smith said. "Sit down on the couch, please."

Remo moved across the room to sit on the sofa. Chiun still stood near the door, looking up at the dynamite.

"Now what I wanted to talk about was this," Smith said. "Corbish is a fraud. He's a vice president of IDC who drugged me and took over CURE's operation. Without authority, without orders, without the right. Remo, he's dangerous. He could bring this country down."

"He told me you'd probably say something like that."

Remo said. "What about the letter turning authority over to him?"

"I wrote that letter ten years ago, Remo. He tortured it out of me."

"He said you'd say that too."

"Do I sound to you as if I'm insane?"

"You and Corbish both sound insane. So now what?"

"There is one man who can tell you the truth," Smith said. "I haven't been able to reach him."

Remo nodded, knowing the man Smith meant.

"But you could reach him," Smith said. "And he could tell you the truth."

Remo nodded again,

"So what I want you to do," Smith said, "is go see him. Ask him. And then when he tells you I'm still in charge, we'll go and get Corbish the hell out of there before he destroys the country."

Remo looked at Chiun, who was nodding. He was being taken in by this, he thought. Time to set him right.

"Knock it off, Smitty," Remo said. "You know damned well that as soon as we leave, you'll be heading out the door."

"That's idiotic, even by your standards," Smith said. "Do you really think I arranged to meet you in Washington so that I could try to escape from you? Arrant nonsense. But I thought you might think that. On the arm of the couch there"—he nodded with his head—"are the keys to these handcuffs. I can't escape unless you unlock them. Go. Find out. I'll be here when you come back."

"That is good sense, Remo," said Chiun. "He will be here when you get back. And then you will have peace of mind in what you do, because conflicting orders are bad for the soul."

"And if I say no?" Remo asked Smith.

"Then CURE is gone and with it, maybe the country."s aid Smith. "And I don't want to live in a country like that anymore. So I won't. And neither will you," he said, raising his hands with the bomb pull cord between them.

Remo got to his feet and dropped the handcuff key into his shirt pocket. "All right, Smitty. This time I'll do it. I'll go ask him. But watch out if this is a wild goose chase."

"It isn't, Remo. Just go."

Remo moved toward the door. "All right, all right, we're going."

He stopped in the doorway and turned back toward Smith.

"By the way, your wife sends her love."

"Thank you," Smith said.

Holly Broon, after firing her last desperate shot at Remo from a small Derringer she had kept concealed in her satin dressing gown, got to her feet.

She did not believe Remo at all. That he had killed her father she did not doubt, but neither did she doubt that the killing had been ordered by Blake Corbish.

Her body felt tired, languid, with the afterglow of lovemaking, but the pleasurable sensations quickly gave way to the frustration she felt at having missed Remo with the shot

She retrieved her police special from under the mahogany cabinet, walked into her bedroom and went to the telephone stand. She dialed a number and fell back on the bed while the phone rang.

"Oh, hello, Mrs. Corbish. May I speak with your husband, please? Yes, just tell him this is Holly." Holly Broon could not resist the implied intimacy of the first-name identification. As she waited for Corbish, she thought again of Remo. He was a rare one, a fighter and a lover. It was an interesting combination. Perhaps he might yet be salvageable. A big corporation like IDC could use a man like that. And for that matter, why restrict it to IDC? The country could use a man like him, particularly if, as she hoped, one day Holly Broon would run the country.

"Oh, yes, Blake, how are you? Fine. Blake, I've been thinking and perhaps we might have that board of directors meeting on schedule the day after tomorrow. But I'd like to talk to you about it. Yes, tonight. Suppose you drive over and pick me up? I'll be ready. We can drive somewhere and talk. Yes. Forty-five minutes will be fine."

She picked a brown two-piece suit out of the closet. It was uncharacteristically modest, but it had the major, virtue of having deep wide pockets which could discreetly contain a gun.

Corbish hung up the phone and noted that oddly his feelings were mixed. He should have been overjoyed but he wasn't. He pondered a moment, then realized what was wrong: he had looked forward to the chance to break down the nine members of the IDC executive board with the information he had gotten on them from CURE's files. It would have been fun, to pick them apart, one at a time, a secret at a time, until they were nothing but piles of bones at Corbish's feet.

But Corbish had learned to take victory as it came. It had come now in the person of Holly Broon. Let it go at that.

"So it's Holly, is it?" Corbish was jolted back to reality by his wife's abrasive voice. His wife was standing behind him, ever-present martini glass in her hand.

"Yes, it's Holly. Holly Broon. She owns IDC."

"It sounded like she thinks she owns you too."

"She does, Teri. She owns everything and everybody in IDC. And soon I'm going to share the ownership of it with her."

"Will there be any left for me?" she demanded. He pushed roughly past her. "Sure there will. Enough to keep you in gin and vermouth. Have another. Have another dozen," he said.

Forty-five minutes later, Corbish was pulling into the driveway of the Broon estate. He started to park the car but Holly Broon came walking down the front stairs, wearing a dark suit and carrying a large handbag. He was glad now that he had worn a sports jacket and slacks. "Hello, Blake," she said, entering the car. "Hello, Holly. Anyplace special you'd like to go?"